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10 Dec 2016 2:51:56am

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Indeed, a religiously inspired (it would seem) philosopher straw manning an argument. Shame some people will be forced to suffer unnecessarily due to this.

I personally found the following quite telling: "Consistent with this approach, Justice Smith gives credibility only to the empirical evidence of the plaintiffs' expert witnesses that the risks and harms to individuals of legalizing assisted suicide are negligible. (Note this is a factually wrong conclusion.) She dismisses most of the defendants' expert witnesses' testimony on the grounds it's not empirically based. Many of the risks and harms of legalized physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia at other than the individual level, are metaphysical (harms to values, beliefs, attitudes, norms and so on) not physical, and not necessarily assessable through empirical research. The exclusion of other valid and accepted research methodologies means that what can't be measured or counted is disregarded."

The judge favoured factual evidence, which seems to upset the author to the point that she explicitly pointed the factual evidence was incorrect. She then waffles on about metaphysics.... which is not factual evidence in a court of law or anywhere and doesn't provide any factual counter evidence.

Anyway, one thing that struck me in this article was at no stage does the author provide anything: argument, fact, logic or philosophical point, that forcing a human to endure a terminal decline to death whilst vomiting their own feacal matter is respectful of life in the sense she uses it or the sense that any human grounded in reality would use the word life.